Drive the racists off the streets

Reports that former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson has applied to join UKIP is causing ripples amongst what’s left of that Eurosceptic party. Even Nigel Farage seems dismayed at the prospect of someone once seen as the leader of a bunch of racist thugs joining the party he once led.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, thinks “the British working class will be electrified” if he joins UKIP. But Robinson is a vain man with an inflated view of his own importance and UKIP counts for little these days.

Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, much later said that his subsequent heirs were “dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants” who were presumably Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Mosley seldom got anything right after he left the second pre-war Labour Government but he was, on this occasion, spot on.

Robinson’s followers largely consist of the ageing racists in the two rival “football lads” movements that having been marching through unwelcoming streets to hurl abuse at Muslims, and everyone else they hate, during the summer break in the football season. These drunken thugs are not Hitler’s legions nor Mosley’s Blackshirts. They cause misery through the trouble they stir wherever they go and their antics can incite random violence against ethnic minorities. But Robinson is not the Duce and the rabble who follow him are not going to March on London anytime now.

The ‘Football Lads’ are very loosely organised former football hooligans and veteran neo-Nazis. Their main agenda is to engage in street fighting and they will pick on any likely target. When they fail to find one, they fight each other. This has totally sabotaged efforts by their leaders to claim they are not racist.

They pose no threat to the state but they do terrorise minority communities, and give police and local authorities justification for rigid social control measures that affect all political activists.

We shouldn’t, of course, ignore the growth of right-wing extremism. The Ukraine government is controlled by fascist movements that extol war-time Nazi collaborators, and the success of the mis-named Swedish Democrat party in the country’s recent general election and the growth of other far-right parties across the rest of the European Union has sent alarm bells across the continent.

Whilst the Blairite and Zionist fifth column within the labour movement carry on with their bogus ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign there is a crying need for a new mass movement to drive the racists off the streets.

Communists must support all the existing anti-racist and anti-fascist movements, as well as taking up John McDonnell’s call for the relaunch of the Anti-Nazi League in response to Islamophobia and the recent upsurge in hate crimes across the country.

Jeremy Corbyn’s number two said: “It’s time for an Anti-Nazi League-type cultural and political campaign to resist” because “we can no longer ignore the rise of far-right politics in our society.”

The ruling class is not inherently racist, but it has always used racism to divide and weaken the working class. When any worker suffers abuse or discrimination because of their race, religion, gender, sexuality or for any other reason, the class as a whole is weakened, and it is the responsibility of the whole class to combat racism and all other divisions of the class.

This is why the New Communist Party does not support separate organisation for workers of different colour, religion or gender. The class must stand united on the basis that an injury to one is an injury to all.